Tour 7 Online Research

Transcription

1 Tour 7 Online Research I. Introduction No question exists that the computer has revolutionized the face of legal research. But the computer has not changed the essential processes of that research. Courts issue opinions, Congress and the General Assembly enact legislation, and administrative agencies promulgate rules in much the same way as has been done for years. The documents actually produced have changed little. Faster access to these documents did result from computer-assisted legal research ( CALR ). The three approaches to legal research used in print adapt well to CALR. Using the known-authority approach requires simply entering the citation and the computer pulling up the document for you. No fuss and straightforward, the computer gets it faster. Moreover, authority cited within a case, statute annotations, and cross-referenced sources may be hyperlinked. Hyperlinks allow a researcher to move quickly and easily between sources. Be warned, however. If your firm does not have a subscription service to WestlawNext, Lexis Advance, or Bloomberg, you are charged a separate fee every time you hit a hyperlink to locate another source. Similarly, the known-topic and descriptive-word approaches are used in CALR. However, some online finding tools work well only if you have some idea about what descriptive words you should be using. When you do not know what words to use, the computer is not as efficient. In that case, using a print index may actually be faster. As soon as any legal research text including online sources is sent to the printer, it will be out-of-date. This tour, then, is intended to be a basic introduction. Online commercial services provide numerous opportunities for additional training in law school and in practice. All prior tours included sections on CALR for that particular resource. Each tour included how to use that resource with the known-topic or known-authority approach. This tour focuses on the descriptive-word approach that applies to all resources although this tour focuses on statutes and case opinions. Your professor may instruct you to wait to do all sections of this tour until after you have completed all of the resource tours. Or, your professor may have you do the coordinating section of this tour with its counterpart in the resource tour. Now that you have been introduced to these resources, you will look at the online sources for the same material and how to use the descriptive-word approach in any of the sources. 1

2 II. Statutes A. Missouri Sign on to Lexis Advance. If you go to LexisNexis first, then click the red button on the left side of the screen that says Go to Lexis Advance. In the middle of the page at the top, you will see a search tool bar. Underneath the tool bar there are three tabs labeled All Content Types, All Jurisdictions, and All Practice Areas & Topics. Under the All Content Types a drop-down box will appear for you to restrict your search to limited locations such as primary or secondary materials. If you know that you are only looking for cases or statutes for example, you can restrict your search to those options or search a combination of sources. Click on Cancel. Under the All Jurisdictions tab, you can restrict your search to a specific state or a combination of states and or federal law. Finally, under the All Practice Areas & Topics you can restrict your search based on topics of law. Notice the different combinations of sources and topics you could search using these limitations. Searching in one of these databases that you have restricted to just what you need would certainly be faster than conducting a search without any restrictions. Now restrict the content to Statutes and Legislation and restrict the state to Missouri. Enter the search term tax and click on Search. You will see all statutes that deal with tax in the state of Missouri. On the left side you will see the Source heading. Locate Missouri Advance Legislative Service. You may have to extend the list by clicking on more. Click on this heading and you will see all bills that mention tax. Now that you have seen some of the legislative sources on Lexis Advance, let s look for a statutory code by using a descriptive-word approach. Recall the following problem you used in Tour 1: Assume your client, a Kansas resident, has asked you to help him contest his recently deceased grandmother s will. Grandma was a Missouri resident. A long-lost relative has suddenly appeared waving around a piece of paper entitled Grandma s Will. The will, of course, leaves all of Grandma s possessions to the long-lost relative. The paper bears what appears to be Grandma s signature, but it is not signed by anyone who witnessed Grandma s signature. No other will has been located. You want to research statutes to see whether the signature of witnesses is required in order for Grandma s will to be valid. First, you need to select a source from the Lexis Advance list. Restrict your search again to Statutes and Legislation under content types and then to Missouri under jurisdiction. To use the descriptive-word approach, both LexisNexis and WestlawNext provide two search modes. One search mode is called Natural Language. Natural language means you can enter your search in sentence format. The computer will pull up a set number of documents (you can decide 2

3 how many) that include those terms and that use them the most often. It does not, however, include the terms in relation to each other. Here, for instance, because the word will is frequently used in other contexts, the documents pulled may not relate to a will used to devise property upon a person s death at all. This Natural Language format is a starting place, but you already have a good idea of what terms to use in this problem. As a result, using the Terms and Connectors search mode will give you a narrower set of documents and thus be more efficient. Both Natural Language and Terms and Connectors uses the same search box. Terms and connectors searching uses Boolean logic that focuses on the relationship between terms. Start by making a list of descriptive words that relate to the facts or legal issues in your problem just like you did in print. You probably thought of words such as will, testamentary, signed, execution, and witnesses. Let s start with will and witnesses. To conduct a Terms and Connectors search in Lexis Advance, enter the terms you wish to use tied together with specific connectors used in Lexis Advance. If you need help understanding what terms and connectors to use, click on search tips next to the search box. The second tab is labeled connectors which shows a connector, its function, and an example of its use. You can click the connector to add it to your search. In Westlaw Next, click advanced located next to the search bar and Connectors and Expanders are located to the right of the advance search criteria. This advanced way to search is how you build a Boolean Terms and Connectors query. In the search box, enter the term will and under search tips, click connectors then choose and from the list. Then, add the term witness to your search Note that you should just enter the singular form of any word. The computer will also include documents that use the plural form. Click Search. How many documents appeared? Probably more than you could skim through quickly. Click on the first document. At the top of the document, a box gives you all terms. You can use this list to scroll to select one of the terms and then scroll through the document to find that particular term. Or you can look at all the terms within your document that you searched. Clicking the arrow will forward you to the next term. Each term is highlighted. What is this document concerning? Does that relate to our problem? Yes and no. Its focus is on whom may witness a will, but it does not the answer to our question. One way to narrow your search is to use a more restrictive connector. Go back to the search box at the top of the screen. Let s replace and with w/sent, which stands for within the sentence. 1 Thus, you are asking for the computer to pull up all documents in this source where the word will is in the same sentence as the word witnesses. How many documents appeared now? Still too many? Then, let s add more of our descriptive words to restrict the search. Go back to the search bar and add a connector with the term execution. Because we would also want sentences that include the term execute, use an expander such that your search term is execution. Then, use and or w/sent. This should pull up a more manageable 1 Page 187 of Missouri Legal Research identifies other connectors to use on Westlaw and LexisNexis. 3

4 number. Let s stop a minute. If you enter execution, will the computer pick up all forms of the word? After all, the singular form will still pick up the plural. Unfortunately, the computer does not think for us and cannot change execution to execute and executed. You have to tell the computer by using a root expander. The root of execution is execut. Thus, you need to add an exclamation point to the end to show you want all forms of the word. So, use another connector and enter execut!. Quickly scan the list. Any of the sections look promising? Section deals with execution of wills. This looks promising. Click on that now. This should look familiar. This was the same statute you found in Tour 1. Notice that the document tells us how current the information is right at the top. It will indicate up to which legislative session this statute is current. That then tells us the date restrictions you could use in a legislative service search to update this statute. Also, notice all of the annotations leading you to other sources of law. Each is hyperlinked providing easy access. B. Federal Both Lexis Advance and WestlawNext provide extensive databases and sources on federal legislation and statutes. Recall that in print West publishes U.S.C.A. and U.S.C.C.A.N., while LexisNexis publishes U.S.C.S. and the U.S.C.S. Advance Legislative Service. Sign on to WestlawNext. Let s take a look at 16 U.S.C.A Since you already have the citation, enter 16 USCA 1531 in the search bar and click search. Note that after the statutory language is a section entitled CREDIT(S). Here you see the public law numbers associated with this section. If you click the tab along the top of the document labeled History and then click on Legislative History, you will find various senate and house reports listed. Look at the navigational tools on the top of your document. These are the tabs at the top of the document highlighted in blue. If your navigational tools are not displayed click the button on the top right of your screen that has a square in the middle with four arrows pointing to it to show the tool bar. Alternatively, if you wish to stay in a single screen view, clicking the same box serves that function.. Find the navigational tools to check the Notes and Decisions, History, Citing References, and Context & Analysis. Under Notes & Decisions, different topics are listed with case citations showing how those topics have affected the statute. This is a great way to narrow a research topic when looking at a specific statute or piece of legislation. Under History, you can research different versions of the statutes or pull up its legislative history. An additional helpful feature is Graphical Statutes. Click on that now. You will see a more visual layout of the section s legislative history. Under the Citing References tab, you can search 4

5 different references including cases, statutes, regulations, etc. that specifically cite the statute. Finally, under Context & Analysis you can research other context in which the statute is used like law review commentaries or the code of federal regulations. If you want to search federal statutes, you can go back to the home screen by clicking the WestlawNext icon on the top left of the screen. In the middle of the page you will see a tab that says Federal Materials. When clicking that link, you will see that the U.S.C.A. has its own database. Click on United States Code Annotated (USCA) and it will connect you to the table of contents. You could do a terms and connectors search for the terms you are seeking or for the popular name of your statute. Click on the USCA Popular Name Table under the Tools and Resources section to the right of the table of contents. You can now search alphabetically for the popular name of your statute. Let s find the Endangered Species Act of Click on that now. Note the very first section listed is 16 U.S.C Let s sign off WestlawNext and sign on to Lexis Advance. Now locate a federal statute using a terms and connectors search. Assume a local client has come to you for legal advice. Your client owns a transport and delivery service. A customer has asked your client to deliver a jaguar (the animal, not the car) that the customer has captured in another country to a third party in the United States. Your client is wary because he has heard that the jaguar is an endangered species, and he wants to know if he is prohibited from transporting the customer s jaguar. What legal advice would you give to your client? III. Case Opinions A. Missouri Free-Access Online Sources To locate any Missouri court s website, begin at This website acts as a portal featuring links to all Missouri courts. The Missouri law schools academic law libraries have links to this portal should you not remember its web address. 2 Better yet, include the website as a bookmark or favorite on your own computer. Sign on to On the right side are links to various kinds of information related to Missouri courts including forms, juror information, and oral argument dockets. One essential link is to court rules. The Missouri Supreme Court issues rules applicable to all courts in Missouri. In addition, each court has its own rules. Always check the local court rules before filing any pleadings or appearing in any hearing in a court. Let s take a 2 The University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law Leon E. Bloch Law Library s research bookmark is The University of Missouri School of Law Library s bookmark is Washington University School of Law Library s research bookmark is 5

6 look. Click on Court Rules. Notice the list of rules that link you to a specific section of the Missouri Supreme Court Rules. Click on the first link, Rules Governing the Missouri Bar and the Judiciary Rules Now click on Rule 13 Legal Assistance by Law Students. This rule governs when a law student may appear in court to represent a client who is indigent or who is a client of a law school clinic. Click on Rule Requirements and Limitations. How many law school credit hours must a student have completed to be eligible to appear in court? After you review the rule, be sure to close out the windows and return to the home page. From the home page, click on Case.net. Case.net is the Missouri State Courts Automated Case Management System. As of December 2011, almost all Missouri state courts and several municipal courts are included. This system allows you to search case records to determine the status of cases. You may search by litigant name, case number, filing date, or scheduled hearings and trials. Click on any of these icons near the top of the page. A drop-down box allows you to choose whether to search all courts or a specific court s records. An alternative way to access a specific court s records is to click on Judicial Links in the top left. Then click on Circuit Courts or Court of Appeals. You will see a map of Missouri divided by the circuit courts under the Circuit Courts link. Choose any circuit court and click. You will get general information about the court. Some circuit courts links include how that court s case.net has been formulated, including how to format the case number. Under the Court of Appeals link, the same map appears but is divided into each district of the court of appeals. Close out of case.net and return to the home page of the Missouri courts. In order to find a court opinion, you need to click on Opinions & Minutes on the righthand side of the home page. Each appellate court opinion is hyperlinked. Remember the Detling v. Edelbrock case you found using print digests? It dealt with whether your client can use the inhabitability of her apartment to sue her landlord or whether she must wait until the landlord sues her for past rent. Recall that it was a Missouri Supreme Court opinion and it can be found in print at 671 S.W.2d 265. Click on opinions next to Supreme Court of Missouri. What else do you need to know to locate the opinion? You will need its date, which was Does the website cover 1984? No. One of the drawbacks of the free-access sites is that their coverage does not reach back historically. Instead choose any more recent case. Does it look funny to you? It may. The opinion is not in the customary format you are used to seeing in West reporters. Why is that? This is not a West publication. The website is government-sponsored. As a result, these are the actual slip opinions that do not have all of the West editorial enhancements such as topics and key numbers, and headnotes. This website does provide some summary information including the judges vote and a summary of the opinion. Just like a West headnote, this summary should not be quoted or cited as it is not part of the court s formal opinion. 6

7 B. Missouri Commercial Online Sources Just as they include statutes, all commercial providers include court opinions as part of their services. Because you were introduced to CALR in the last section, this section will focus on using the features available specifically for court opinions in the context of the same problem you used in Tour 2: Your client Valerie approaches you about the condition of her new apartment. Two weeks after moving in, she noticed red sores all over her arms and legs that were later diagnosed as bed bug bites. Valerie thoroughly cleaned her apartment and even bought new furniture and a new mattress; but, in two weeks, the bites returned. She notified her landlord; but, two months later, the landlord has done nothing to the apartment and the bed bugs are still present, regardless of Valerie s numerous attempts to sanitize the apartment. She does not wish to pay her rent until the problem is fixed. Valerie wants to know if she can bring a cause of action against her landlord due to the inhabitable conditions of her apartment or if she must wait to be sued by her landlord for breaching her lease. Just like print research, you start by identifying descriptive words to use in your search. Identify the important facts or legal issues in this fact pattern that might lead you to case law governing your client s problem. You probably came up with words such as apartment, bug infestation, rent, landlord, tenant, and habitability, to name a few. Which should you start with? You want to start with the broadest words that you feel are the most closely related to the problem. Before you sign on to WestlawNext or LexisNexis Advance, construct your search query. Many attorneys waste valuable computer time by not constructing their queries ahead of time. Signing on before you know the query means the clock is ticking adding to your bill while you are deciding what to ask the computer to find. What query would give you the broadest search, but still focus on your issue? If you just entered landlord, the number of results would be unworkable. Let s use the other words in your query to narrow the possibilities: landlord & rent. Now sign on to WestlawNext. In print research, this is the point where you would need to select which digest to use. For online research, you should pick the database or source that is the narrowest possible that includes the authority that applies. The larger the database, the more expensive the cost. As you know you just want Missouri law, no need exists to use a database that includes all fifty states. To restrict your search to Missouri cases, in the middle of the WestlawNext Screen click State Materials, then select Missouri. When you get to the screen specifically for Missouri, click All Missouri State Cases. Now in the search bar type landlord & rent and click search. How many cases did you find? Is it a workable number? Probably not. Check the summaries of the first few opinions. Do they deal with your issue at all? How would you 7

8 change your search query? Click in the search box and enter additional terms such as & habitability or try more restrictive connectors, such as /p for same paragraph or /s for same sentence. Keep modifying until you get a workable number. Is the Detling v. Edelbrock case included in your results? Click on that case now. Notice the hyperlink after the case caption entitled Original Image of 671 S.W.2d 265 (PDF). Click on that now. What happened? The layout of the opinion changed to match the way it looks in the print reporter. Choose whichever layout you prefer. Notice that the WestlawNext version of the opinion contains all of the features of the West reporters: syllabus, topics and key numbers, and headnotes. Scroll through the headnotes to find one that deals with whether your client may use the inhabitability of her apartment to sue her landlord or whether she must wait until the landlord sues her for past rent. One way to identify an applicable headnote is that the terms used in your search query will be highlighted. Which headnote seems to apply? Headnote 12 states that tenants may use a breach of the implied warranty of habitability as a basis for an affirmative cause of action. Click on the headnote number directly, [12], to verify that the opinion states what the headnote represents as the court s holding. In Tour 2 you learned how to update the topic and key number to locate additional authorities using the Custom Digest feature of WestlawNext. But you can also locate topics and key numbers by the known-topic approach. Click on the WestlawNext icon on the left side. Then click on the tab labeled tools. The first link is West Key Number System, click that link. You are sent to a screen that gives you three options to locate a key number. One way is to enter your topic in the search bar. Next, you can peruse the Key Number Topics This is very similar to looking at the outline at the beginning of each digest topic. Lastly, you can use the Title Search feature to search headings. In the Title Search window, enter the words landlord, habitability, and tenant. Were you sent to our familiar Landlord and Tenant 125? Not exactly. You were sent to a list of over fifty possible topics and subtopics, but if you scroll down the list you will see Landlord and Tenant, but 125 is not included. Why is that? Our search terms. The topic and key number used the term tenantable, not habitability. This was a search of just the titles, not the annotations themselves. Thus, in the Title Search box enter tenantable, landlord, and tenant.does 125 appear? Don t forget that more than one topic and key number may be relevant to your issue. But how easy is it to use the same topic and key number in another jurisdiction? From any case, you can click on the topic and key number and right underneath the key number and topic name is the jurisdiction. Click change and select the state that you would like to research. Just like you could locate a court opinion knowing only one party s name by using the table of cases in print digests, you can search online by a party s name. Click on the 8

9 WestlawNext icon to start a new search. Restrict the search to Kansas by clicking on the drop down menu next to the search bar and choosing only Kansas or from the main screen click Cases from the All Content tab and then select Kansas. This will bring you to a screen that allows you to choose either federal or state cases. Choose Kansas. All you need to do is type Libel in the search bar. If the case from Tour 2 does not come up try adding and Corcoran after the original search term. One way to locate an opinion by a party name is to include a restriction by field as part of your search query. 3 Click on the link advanced next to the Search button. Scroll down to the box Name/Title. Here, enter the parties names. Notice the change in the search box. It changed to limit the search to just the name of the case. Only two cases appear. How do you find the rest? Click on View all 8. Can you find Libel v. Corcoran? Click on that case. Once you have identified potentially relevant authority, you can then further refine your search to locate other terms in the document. 4 From the first screen of the case opinion, click on the icon arrow with the magnifying glass at the top of the document on the right side. Another search box opens allowing you to pinpoint specific terms or to further restrict your search. Here, let s assume you are particularly interested in any discussion in the case that discusses competence. In the search box, enter the query competence. Now each time this term is mentioned it is highlighted. Next to where you placed the search term there are arrows that allow you to navigate to the next or previous term in your document. Bloomberg Bloomberg is an additional search tools to find case opinions, company information, or conduct legal research with the ability to share workspace with other students. In the search Go Bar, it s as easy as entering the names of the parties to a case, entering a case citation or entering the name of a company to locate financial information. Enter Detling v. Edelbrock in the search bar. You will notice before you pres search that five options show up including search with: all legal content, citation search, court opinions by case name, dockets by party name, and news search. Click Court Opinion by Case name and the case should come up. Select the case. Along the top of the document, there are tabs including Document, BCite, Ecosearch and secondary sources. Under BCite you will see how other cases have either positively or negatively cited our case. On the right side of the screen at the bottom of the heading BCite heading, there is a link to explain the BCite indicators. Click that link and read the explanations. Going back to the document, Bloomberg does not filter opinions by headnotes or keycites like Lexis Advance or WestLaw Next. Bloomberg is a great way to search case law when you know the party names or the citation, but using this source for a natural language search is somewhat difficult. 3 LexisNexis s similar feature calls them segments. 4 LexisNexis employs a similar feature entitled FOCUS that also allows you to further restrict a search. 9

10 IV. Conclusion Remember that the computer takes what you enter literally. When you have known authority, online researching is definitely a time-saver and you can research thoroughly and efficiently. But when you don t have known authority and try to use the known-topic approach or the descriptive-word approach, your results are inconsistent and not always helpful. This is when using print sources may be more helpful. You can quickly peruse pages of headnotes in a digest faster than you can scroll through unhelpful headnotes online. Some feel print sources let them see other possible subtopics much easier than online. While in law school, you have the luxury of unlimited time on WestlawNext and Lexis Advance. This does not really encourage you to become a cost-effective user. It is up to you to keep in mind that most steps of online research involve an additional charge. Even with subscription services, the commercial providers review the usage in determining the cost of renewing the service. Becoming a thorough, but cost-efficient researcher is a valuable skill, and it is one that is prized by employers. 10

11 Tour 7 Online Research Check-Up 1. Can your client legally transport the jaguar? What search did you use and where? Give the citation in proper format. 2. What is the difference between using terms and connectors versus natural language as a means of searching online in WestlawNext or Lexis Advance? 3. Should you construct your search query before or after you sign on to WestlawNext or Lexis Advance? Why? 4. How many law school credit hours must a student complete to be eligible to appear in court? Give the citation in proper format. 5. After signing on to WestlawNext, start at the Search Box. Below the search box, click Federal Materials, then Federal Cases, then U.S. Court of Appeals Click the small i above where the circuits are listed. a) What are the content highlights? 11

12 b) Does this database include volume 45 of the Federal Reporter (45 F.)? 6. Click on the Eighth Circuit? Name two case decisions decided on July 30, Sign on to Lexis Advance. Click Browse Sources. Narrow your search on the left side of the screen by choosing News and then restrict further by selecting Missouri. Click on the St. Louis Post Dispatch. When a smaller pop-up window appears, click view more information for this source. a) Who publishes this newspaper? b) How frequently is the paper published? 12